Science Up Front

Each year in late summer, amid the leaf litter of forests of the northeastern United States and Canada, the slavemaking ant Protomognathus americanus raids the nests of a tiny ant known as Temnothorax longispinosus. The slavemakers kill the Temnothorax adults and steal away their helpless pupae, holding the young captive and raising them to serve as the next generation of slaves.
This dramatic struggle is disconcerting for its obvious parallels to oppression and slavery in human societies. But it is perhaps even more unsettling because it suggests that these activities, which are widely condemned in our societies, have biological underpinnings. Read the rest of this entry »

The Namib Sand Sea sweeps along the west coast of Africa, its sands sculpted into arcing dunes stretching to heights of 250 meters. On the surface, the sands of these massive mounds seem as though they are in constant motion, pushed and scattered by wind, carried away on streams of air, and replaced by new sands. But a study by Pieter Vermeesch, a researcher at Birkbeck University, London, has drawn attention to sands of a very different character in the Namib—sands that have lain immobile, buried in dunes, for the last one million years. Read the rest of this entry »

The flying fish is famous for its ability to glide effortlessly over the tops of waves, sometimes remaining suspended in air for 30 seconds and covering a distance of 400 meters. How air interacts with the fins and body of the fish to enable this amazing feat formed the basis of a recent study led by Haecheon Choi and Hyungmin Park, researchers at Seoul National University. Choi and Park's study, published in October in the Journal of Experimental Biology, was the first to elucidate details of flying fish aerodynamics. And the results, to the astonishment of many, revealed that these ocean-dwelling flyers glide as efficiently as some birds. Read the rest of this entry »

Located in northeastern Ethiopia, less than 200 miles from the coast of the Horn of Africa, lies the Afar, a desert region that is a hotbed for hominin discovery. Since the mid-1970s, several key fossils of these early human ancestors have been unearthed there, including Lucy, one of the most complete hominin skeletons ever discovered. But while these spectacular finds have introduced us to a fascinating chapter in human evolution, they have also given rise to many questions, particularly about hominin biology and the ancient Afar environment in which Lucy and her kin thrived. Read the rest of this entry »

The last place one might think to look for insights into the complexities of the human brain would be the brains of worms. But a tiny annelid is precisely where researchers Raju Tomer and Detlev Arendt, at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, stumbled upon the “mushroom body”—an invertebrate brain structure that is the equivalent of the vertebrate cerebral cortex, or pallium, which in humans handles complex cognitive functions, such as thought and memory. Read the rest of this entry »

The European eelpout is an unusual little fish, and one that few of us might ever expect to hear about. But it has been a curious subject of scientific study for many years, primarily because rather than laying eggs like most other fish, females give birth to live young. Exactly how female eelpouts manage to produce live offspring without an umbilical cord—an adaptation found only in placental mammals—remained one of the great mysteries of fish biology until recently, when Peter Skov, a researcher at the Technical University of Denmark, cracked the case. Skov and colleagues not only uncovered physiological

Moving silently and in single file through the forests of Kibale National Park in Uganda, males of the Ngogo chimpanzee community scour the boundaries of their territory. They are looking for evidence of intruders, sometimes deliberately venturing into neighboring territory, with intent to kill. The victims, adults, immatures, males, and females, are outsiders to the Ngogo community. But this difference alone does not explain the killings. Rather, John Mitani, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, believes that these acts of violence were performed for reasons of territorial expansion—a motive of warfare not uncommon to our own species.

Lying deep in the black shale of the Francevillian basin in western Africa are secrets that have profoundly impacted scientists' understanding of the evolution of life on Earth. In 2008 sedimentologist Abderrazak El Albani helped unearth the oldest known fossils of multicellular organisms from the rocky outcrop. And this summer, after completing extensive analyses of the specimens, El Albani and colleagues published their groundbreaking discoveries, which effectively pushed the origin of complex organisms back a full 1.5 billion years earlier than previous estimates. Read the rest of this entry »

Artemisia annua is the source of artemisinin, a compound discovered in the 1970s that is now one of the most effective substances available for the treatment of severe malaria.
But A. annua farmers have struggled to produce enough plant material to supply global demand for artemisinin. And according to Ian A. Graham and Dianna Bowles, researchers at the University of York’s Centre for Novel Agricultural Products (CNAP), many A. annua plants currently grown for commercial purposes in places such as Africa and China are in fact suboptimal artemisinin producers.

For some species, subterranean life means an increased sense of security. But for the burrowing eastern mole, found primarily in southeastern North America, life underground is driven by an obsession with digging that has brought with it a series of odd, but useful physical adaptations, including webbed front feet built for tunnelling and hinged hairs that ease forward and backward movement in confined spaces.

But as University of Manitoba biologist Kevin Campbell has discovered, the eastern mole’s subterranean adaptations are more than skin deep—the animal’s blood contains an unusual form of the oxygen-carrying molecule hemoglobin, endowing the little